FROM HISTORY MUSEUMS TO GRACE, ALONG WITH A FEW MEALS

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Joy Williams: The Quick & the Dead. This 2000 novel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is built around three essentially motherless preteen girls who are ultimately unsupportable as believable characters. I kept reading, wondering why, only to find the ending simply evaporate. She has her fans, but I’m not one of them.
  • Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds: History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment. As someone with long familiarity with both natural history and art museums, I have also long visited American history museums without giving them much thought as a separate category until my wife mentioned the cabinet of curiosities concept, based on the trunks seafaring captains were expected to bring home for the enlightenment of their communities. Wonderful insights in these essays into the growth and critical limitations of theme-focused collections, living history villages, historic house sites, shrines, and so on. My favorite rips Disney, especially at EPCOT, to shreds.
  • Kate Chopin: The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction. Despite her glimpses into Deep South and Creole society in the late 1800s, Chopin’s portrayal of an infantile self-centered heroine, like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina before her, drew little sympathy from me. Tedious.
  • Richard Russo: That Old Cape Magic. A lively, humorous story with a pair of very dysfunctional, professorial parents unfolding in the background of the protagonist’s own string of affairs and failing marriage. In the end, quite pointed, bitterly funny, and emotional moving. Quite different from Empire Falls.
  • Angelo M. Pellegrini: The Food-Lover’s Garden; The Unprejudiced Palate; Lean Years, Happy Years; and Vintage Pellegrini. More than a decade before Julia Child began to transform American cuisine, this Seattle-based English professor born in Italy launched his own arguments for a more delicious, healthier alternative to the dull meals of the era, on one hand, and the impossible directions for preparing pretentious international fare, on the other. For those who grew up thinking spaghetti came out of a can, as I did, Pellegrini’s texts are a reminder that even garlic, zucchini, and broccoli were exotic rarities, when they could be found at all. (As for cheese?) His emphasis remains stubbornly on fresh vegetables and fruit, the essential role of homegrown herbs, and the joys of wines made in one’s own cellar. I love the simplicity of many of his meals – a broth, salad, and bread as dinner, for instance. His stories along the way are delightful. I can see why he has long been one of my wife’s favorite food writers.
  • Anne Lamott: Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith and Blue Shoes. Another of my wife’s favorites, Lamott’s confessions of faith are refreshingly both comic and startling. While the novel Blue Shoes sets out on that light-toned approach, about halfway through it takes on a dark realism that soon parallels Russo’s That Old Cape Magic, complete with the parents’ infidelities.  It’s hard to think of other authors who present children as masterfully as she does, or, for that matter, relations with a parent in mental decline. Her real-life religion admits the realities of adultery, even among believers, and of grace in unexpected encounters. The protagonist’s discoveries about her own father lead to some of the most heart-breaking pages one will encounter, and some of the most illuminating examples of selfless love. A knockout.

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FROM BISHOP SPONG TO LIGHTHOUSES

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • John Shelby Spong: Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes. Or, as the paperback cover also proclaims, “Freeing Jesus from 2,000 years of misunderstanding.” Here the then-Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, advances scholarship that argues the Synoptic gospels and Book of Acts were intended to be read aloud in the synagogue and early church as parallel texts to the day’s Pentateuch (Torah) portion. Rather than being accurate biography or history, then, he contends that they were essentially a midrash voicing something of the intensity of the early “followers of the Way,” theologically but not factually true. Crucial to his rational is an awareness of the major Hebrew holidays of the time, and placing the Christian teachings within them – that is, also within a lunar calendar. Thus, instead of a chronological history of Jesus’ working with the disciples over a three-year period, or more, the Synoptic texts compress their presentation into a one-year framework. In the final sections of the book he deconstructs the Nativity and the Resurrection, as well as many of the teachings attributed to Jesus, yet leaves a strong case that what was being demanded was an experience of the Spirit/Holy Spirit, rather than Jesus.
  • Patricia Lynn Reilly: A God Who Looks Like Me: Discovering a Woman-Affirming Spirituality. Essentially a self-help workbook for women to work through, either individually or in “circles of support,” this 1995 publication is now a generation old and no doubt surpassed by more comprehensive volumes. It does included reference to El Shaddai as “breast” even though it’s often translated in its other meaning, “high places.” She also includes a list of alternative images to use in place of masculine terms, including Womb of Compassion, Nurturer, Seeker of the Lost, Source of All Life, Faithful Mother, Shekhinah, Healer, Sophia, Queen of Heaven, Gathering Mother Hen, and so on. She makes a strong case for the negative outlook on female functions, including birth, as unclean, and curiously the lack of an infant rite equal to circumcision. She also makes a claim for the decreased value of woman as they age. I like her suggestion to record reactions to her exercises using one’s non-dominant hand, and wonder if this might help me get deeper into my own repressed layers.
  • Harold Loukes: Friends and Their Children. This 1958 British publication comes from another era as it attempts to steer a third way between those parents who would insist on a dogmatic training for their children and those who would offer them none. He does follow the cycle through infancy, the first years at school, adolescence, and so on. I wonder if any of it would have helped, back when.
  • Eugene Ehrlich and David H. Scott: Mene, Mene, Tekel: A lively lexicon of words and phrases from the Bible. Despite William Safire’s praises in the New York Times, I find little reason to continue keeping it on my bookshelves, not when I have Strong’s concordance.
  • Jessamyn West: Except for Me and Thee. A charming novel of a Midwestern Quaker couple and their family roughly covering the years 1810-1875. Some of it I would question against the cultural history, but for the most part, I think she gets it right. In some ways, it dovetails in nicely with MFK Fisher’s outsider look at small-town California Friends only decades later.
  • Sarah C. Gleason: Kindly Lights: A History of the Lighthouses of Southern New England. While my focus is on the lighthouses of New Hampshire, Maine, and Cape Cod, this volume goes far beyond its Southern New England catalog. Gleason provides a detailed history of the origins of the American lighthouse system, including a timeless examination of the true costs of a bureaucracy that for too long concentrated on a lowest-bidder mentality.
  • Jared Diamond: Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality. Despite the title, this is a rather pedestrian dynamic based on the need for childcare within the tribe.

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FROM TRUE LEVELLERS TO WHITTIER, CALIFORNIA

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • David Boulton: Gerrard Winstanley and the republic of heaven. This all-too-brief overview of the legendary leader of the True Levellers (Diggers) focuses on his four years of publication, 1648-52, which are coincidentally the early years of Quaker history for which we lack original writings. Boulton makes a compelling case for Winstanley’s early impact on the emerging Quaker movement, his subsequent divergence from it, and an eventual reunion. Tantalizing in its possible reconsideration of the origins of thought and practice in the resulting Society of Friends.
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Cost of Discipleship. An unrelenting, passionate argument first published in 1937 of Christian faith rooted in the Incarnated Word, and giving up all to follow the call of Christ. Seen through the ensuing events of the Nazi regime and World War II, the martyrdom becomes all too inevitable. From our own perches, however, a still startling set of demands emerges, one that often stands in contrast to the Light/Logos faith I see emerging from the same chapter of John.
  • Paul Buckley, ed.: Dear Friend: Letters & Essays of Elias Hicks. These pieces, taken from the last quarter-century of Hicks’ life and ministry, give us the clearest existing insights into his theological perspectives as they led into and through the controversies that now go by his name. To the surprise, no doubt, of many, his writings are thoroughly immersed in Scripture, citations that now demand footnotes, which Buckley provides. Perhaps the one nuance Hicks applies to the traditional Quaker understanding of the Light is his equating it with the Spirit of Truth as well as Reason. Still, he grounds both of these in personal spiritual experience, rather than outward teaching. A welcome addition to our understanding of the evolution of the Society of Friends, pro and con.
  • MFK Fisher: Among Friends. The acclaimed author of food classics grew up among the non-Quaker minority in the Orthodox (Gurneyite) enclave of Whittier, California. In this memoir of a childhood before and during the First World War, she repeatedly touches on the inconspicuous prejudices of the small-town Friends, as well as her own family’s quirky social (and asocial) reactions and adaptations. An insightful counterbalance to other volumes that have examined the matter of living “behind a protective hedge” and the ensuing Quaker cultures that emerged.

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FROM QUAKER CULTURE TO JANE’S CLAY PUPPETS

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • James Walvin, The Quakers: Money & Morals; Jean R. Sunderlund, Quakers & Slavery; Barry Levy: Quakers and the American Family. These three volumes, tackled together while purging my spirituality shelves in my lair, present a fascinating examination of Quaker economic systems in history. Walvin approaches the rise of Quaker wealth and capitalism in Britain, especially through the networks of traveling ministers, apprenticeships, extended families, and so on. Of course, within three or four generations we had the phenomenon of much of those families leaving the Society of Friends and, later, the companies themselves being acquired by larger corporations. Sunderlund examines the resistance in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to the abolition of slavery, finding it more intense in some quarters than in others – but most intensely entrenched in the yearly meeting’s hierarchy itself. While he ponders the events that allowed the yearly meeting to turn in the 1750s, he does not calculate what I sense might be the most obvious: the wealthiest families, which were most likely to own slaves, were drifting away from Friends. Combine that with the deaths of the previous generation of wealthy leaders who remained Quaker, and you have the possibility that persuasion had less to do with the transformation than we might hope. Levy, meanwhile, raises the model of Quaker farming as an underpinning of the success of Friends as an institution across multiple generations. He suggests that the families that were least able to set their children up on their own farms or businesses were also the least likely to see their children find mates within the Society of Friends, and thus marry out. He also observes that in Quaker marriages, the husband was not the authoritative head of the household, not in the model Calvinists followed. Rather, a marriage was subject to the women’s meeting, shifting the authority to the women elders. This is a powerful aspect of the women’s meeting I’ve not previously seen articulated, and one that could be greatly advanced.
  • Christian Pessey & Remy Samson: Bonsai Basics: A Step-by-Step Guide to Growing, Training & General Care. A lovely little book (yard sale find) that may very well convince me not to undertake what would obviously become another compulsive activity.
  • Andrei Codrescu: Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments. More about the royal brothers and their problems, ultimately, than the ostensible subject. Gets lost in scholarly insider jokes and footnotes and socio-economic/political sidebars. Quite disappointing.
  • Jane Kaufmann: Unframed. A marvelous coffee-table art book autobiography of a popular New Hampshire ceramic artist and her life’s work. Great for endless inspiration, especially in keeping a light yet acerbic touch.

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FROM THE CROSS TO CHINESE CHARACTERS, WITH LADY CHATTERLY ALONG THE WAY

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Richard John Neuhus: Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus From the Cross. A beautifully designed volume laced with some tender pastoral memories, the line of argument ultimately collapses for me under the weight of the Augustinian tradition and its emphasis on Paul (or more likely pseudo-Paul) rather than Jesus himself. Despite all of the subtle contortions, I don’t see God getting off the hook here.
  • D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover: What a marvelous bit of storytelling! I love the way he’s free to tell, with just enough show to make it compelling. Some marvelous dialect here, too. As for the scandal, he was pushing the envelope of conventionality. All of the anti-social diatribe, however, reminds me too much of Micki. How curious!
  • D.H. Lawrence: Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, Short Stories. A tedium sets in quickly with these, especially as one sees them as studies for the later Chatterley. So much of the dialogue awaits action, which proves tepid when it arrives.
  • Friends General Conference, Religious Education Committee: Opening Doors to Quaker Worship. Some interesting exercises for deepening an understanding of Friends Meeting, some for adults. One to pass along.
  • Walden Bello: Visions of a Warless World. A survey of world religions regarding war, including the dual strands in the Judeo-Christian stream in which God originates as a war deity and is transformed along the way. But I find the broader vision missing – just how, for instance, do we channel the innate aggression in human nature?
  • Ernest Fenolosa, edited by Ezra Pound: The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. What fun to revisit this piece from much earlier in my career!

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FROM GOD TO CINCINNATI

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Karen Armstrong: A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A stunning a provocative overview. One I will be returning to repeatedly. Its examination of early Islam, especially, opens entirely unexpected perspectives to my awareness. The distinction between the Trinity of Western Christianity and of Orthodoxy is quite helpful in my emerging argument of Logos/Light.
  • G.I. Gurdjieff: Meetings With Remarkable Men; P.D. Ouspensky: The Fourth Way: A Lucid Explanation of the Practical Side of G.I. Gurdjieff’s Teachings. Two that will be leaving my collection. The meetings aren’t all that remarkable – for the most part, mostly travel journeys, actually, or an autobiography – in quite meandering, wordy prose. I could easily come up with nine more remarkable individuals from my own sojourns – and not exclusively male, like his. The Ouspensky turns out to be equally convoluted Q&A accounts of speculation. The wordiness (and vast ego) leave me unmoved.
  • David Meltzer: Hero/Lil and Six. After Armstrong’s explanation of Kabbalah and its growth, I returned to these two poetry collections and find them quite rich and energizing. Hero, however, comes across as more of a villain (and a deadly trickster, at his best) than does Lilith. Some great leaping within the individual works, including (to my surprise) the prose-poems in Six that actually work for me.
  • Robert Lawrence Smith: A Quaker Book of Wisdom: Life Lessons in Simplicity, Service, and Common Sense. A former headmaster of Sidwell Friends School reflects on the lessons he learned growing up in Philadelphia Quaker culture and the ways it played out over the ensuing years.
  • Stephen Mitchell: Parables and Portraits. An enjoyable read of original poems and prose poems based in large part on Biblical figures and their stories as well as others ranging from Manjushri and Huang-po to Vermeer and Freud.
  • Three poetry chapbook competition winners – Carolyn Page, Barn Flight; Linda Lee Harper, Buckeye; and Gary Myers, Lifetime Possessions. Page, a native of Rochester, presents some disturbingly violent insights into Swamp Yankee and then redneck (in North Carolina) life; the poems are essentially flat, prosaic, a single read tells you everything. Harper, with her stories of a childhood in Cincinnati, has a little more edge; still, I’m left wondering how rare my upbringing was, since I’ve found no hints of childhood sexual abuse. The last four poems in Myers’ volume break free from the pack and enter into a dreamlike state – the first pieces, in fact, that have stirred my admiration (how I wish he’d been able to sustain this for the entire book!).

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FROM POETRY WINNERS TO MIRACLES

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Poetry book competition winners, mostly. Mary Biddinger, Prairie Fever (Steel Toe); Chuck Carlisle, A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs (Concrete Wolf); Mark Conway, Any Holy City (Silverfish); Becky Gould Gibson, Need-Fire (Bright Hill); Michelle Gillett, The Green Cottage (Ledge); Noah Eli Gordon, Acoustic Experience (Pavement Saw); Jason Irwin, Watering the Dead (Pavement Saw); Joshua Kryah, Glean (Nightboat); Rachael Lyon, The Normal Heart and How It Works (White Eagle Coffee Store); Dawn Lundy Martin, Discipline (Nightboat); Rusty Morrison, The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story (Ahsanta); Heather Aimee O’Neill, Memory Future (Gold Line); Simon Ortiz, From Sand Creek (Arizona); Pitt Poetry Series, New and Selected 2012; Liz Robbins, Play Button (Cider Press Review); Jonathan Thirkield, The Waker’s Corridor (Louisiana State); Cider Press Review, Vol. 12; Slipstream, No. 31.  By and large, how dreadful – even meaningless or worse, false – I find these hermetic works of creative writing MFAs, often incestuously selected by associate professors of creative writing or literature. Far from finding anything I might wish I had written, I’m instead left grasping at straws for anything I might even admire – even a single line or stanza seems elusive. On top of it, the pervasive anti-Christian invective in many seems to amplify the shallowness of much of any thought running through these – often, there’s only a vague link to the title. And all of these similes!  Admittedly, many of these are gorgeously produced – their covers, especially. So what I’m keeping, this round: Need-Fire, with its impeccable scholarship of early Christianity in England and its lovely reconstruction of early English verse; Glean, with its lacy evocations. Ortiz remains in a class by himself.
  • Albert Goldbarth: Heaven and Earth. Wonderful collection (poems).
  • Poetry, December 2011-April 2012. Catching up! Some good work by Dan Beachy-Quick, Dick Allen, and Linda Kunhardt (December), varied responses to prayer and faith (“One Whole Voice,” February), Marina Tsvetaeva plus Kabbalah-influenced work (March).
  • American Poetry Review, March-April 2012. No keepers, apart from an essay on metaphor.
  • George Fox: Book of Miracles. A reconstruction of pastoral work by Fox, with extensive introduction looking at the expectation of miracles and providences at the time.
  • Evelyn Underhill: Abba. A close gloss on the Lord’s Prayer and its radical implications.

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FROM SYMBOLS TO MAKING A DIFFERENCE

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Mary Douglas: Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. This is one volume that has perplexed and confounded me ever since I picked it up in 1983 in Dupont Circle. Part of my difficulty is in her compression of symbol and ritual, and another part in her use of African tribal anthropology to illustrate some theory. What I take away from this is that there are conventions in any society that enhance or facilitate actions that benefit both the individuals and the collectivity. When the experiences of individuals are paramount, there is little way of expressing them across the collectivity; when the collectivity is paramount, the individual may be crushed. Divide this individual/collectivity plane by another she calls grid/group and you get what I see in the collectivity as the faith community (group) or the totalitarian/bureaucratic regime (grid). Here, in the grid, the empowered individual may be the elite leader who moves people as pawns, while in the group, the individual may be … the mystic? If I interpret her right, groups may form at the fringe of society, while grids instead become the majority or norm. Whew!
  • David Burnie: Light. An Eyewitness Science illustrated book, this one gives me a clearer concept of scientific thought on light itself. Apart from a timeline of discoveries from the time the Quaker movement emerged up to the present, the bits leave me wondering just what I might incorporate into the idea of metaphor … and how.
  • A. Monroe Aurand Jr.: Early Life of the Pennsylvania Germans. Pamphlet.
  • Plain magazine. Nine issues Rachel received on Cushing Street. Lovely periodical that would likely have been better as a blog, if only they weren’t so neo-Luddite! Yes, I remain fond of hot type and all. The Barnesville connection made the issues especially pertinent to me as I reflect on the moves that landed me here.
  • Charles E. Fager: A Man Who Made a Difference: The Life of David H. Scull. This biography of a 20th century Friend made an interesting counterpoint to the Plain strand, although perhaps just as economically distant from the modern mainstream. Scull was able to do much of his far-reaching work within socially conscious organizations because of the freedom his small company gave him, thanks in part to his equally committed business partner. But that road, demonstrated by the cusp of the computer revolution in printing, Scull’s business, has changed everything. What are the alternatives for young Friends today?
  • E.F. Schumacher: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Like Muddling Toward Frugality (above), this classic is both dated and visionary. The devastation of globalization – on American wages, for starters – and the emergence of the Internet throw many of his strategies into disarray, yet the underpinning arguments of wrong focus and limited resources remain intriguing and relevant.

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OF SPRAWLING SYMPHONIES AND MUDDLING

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries. OK, the first one’s not a book, apart from the liner notes. But it’s still a major undertaking:

  • Gunter Wand conducts Bruckner, the nine symphonies: Listening to these in sequence close together discloses how little the composer grew from the first to last work. They become bombastic fanfares over wavering strings, and heavy footed. Only in No. 8 does he use harps, and then three of them. Despite all of the religious impulse others find in these works, I find them postured, with a vengeful, magisterial deity rather than the blissful radiance I feel in worship. While I have 3, 7, and 9 on vinyl, I am surprised how much of the others I recognize, at least in certain passages. So this has been an instructive exercise, especially in its unintended conjunction with Augustine.
  • Warren Johnson: Meddling Toward Frugality. An interesting 1978 volume from Sierra Club Books that is in many ways dated, especially in its expectations of decentralization and increasing local control, much of his overall thesis remains intriguing. His failure to anticipate the impact of globalization, computerization, and the wealth shift to the wealthiest Americans skewers his predictions, yet his expectations of lower worker income is bearing out (despite higher productivity!). His interpretation of muddling as positive, and demonstrated in both corporate and political decision-making, is illuminating. On a more personal note, I appreciate his interpretation of the Eden story as yet one more layer of wisdom: “The Biblical legend of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden seems clearly to describe the invention of agriculture. The tree of knowledge was the knowledge of agriculture: ‘The tree was good for food,’ and the woman took the first step – ‘She took the fruit thereof and did eat’ (Genesis 3:60). The penalty was the expulsion from the Garden [of the hunter-gatherer society] and ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’ (Genesis 3:19). Most important, it was irreducible. Once the knowledge had been gained and populations had risen above the carrying capacity of the hunter and gatherer, there was no turning back. The expulsion from the Garden was final. … Mankind would henceforth live in an intimate relationship with the soil.”

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FROM THICH NHAT HANH TO AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Thich Nhat Hanh: Buddha Mind, Buddha Body and Call Me by My True Name. The first, subtitled “Walking Toward Enlightenment,” lays out classic Buddhist teaching regarding human thought processes – something with interesting parallels to what I’m considering in the Quaker experience – as well as some good passages on seeds that may be applicable to my examination of the metaphor of The Seed. The collected poems, however, strike me as amateurish – first drafts, apparently all from single-day attempts – rather than deeply profound. Both volumes, all the same, treasured gifts.
  • Russell Banks: The Darling. A tale of a Weatherman member who goes underground and then flees to Africa, where she becomes the wife of a Liberian civil minister before getting caught up in the civil wars that bring the tyrant Charles Taylor to power. Masterful plotting, moving across past and present, and a range of meticulous reporting that includes not just politics and history but also ethnology and, especially, chimpanzee survival issues. Having read two Banks’ novels, now, I now move him to my list of favorites. But how many of his 22 or more volumes do I tackle?
  • Augustine of Hippo: City of God. Revisiting this political science course assignment, I am surprised how little I remember of his argument but am also impressed by my previous underlining and comments. Even so, a few of his points remained in my mind, especially the part about faith standing apart from rewards (even though Augustine eventually presses the heavenly rewards argument). His criticism of the pagans is solid and his argument that a society and government failing to uphold justice are no commonwealth at all – that is, are invalid. But he falls into the trap of predestination and despite his claims to the contrary, cannot support his claims we are free to do good. This time around, I see his extensive framing of a theology based on Original Sin of Eve as a faulty, and see no need for so many pages examining faithful and fallen angels, at least in terms of a polity. His statements about serving victorious forces, seeing their victory as God’s providence, and about just war are quite troublesome, while his descriptions of the City of God are logically thin – unsupported claims, essentially. Crucially for me is his error is linking the Word to Jesus alone: “the only begotten Word of God” – this, despite his close examination earlier of the schools of philosophy following from Pythagoras and Plato. I see this, ultimately, as a formulation of Catholic Orthodoxy far more than as any political blueprint.

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